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Whodunnit? A Share A Story Musical Mystery/Tropes
Alan Smithee: ** Alan is credited as a co-writer, "replacing" the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Chairman of the Board . ** refused to take part in the project, so ended up doing the majority of Bert's puppetwork whilst performed Grover. was the Oscar understudy, credited as "Georgina Spelvin". * California Doubling: ** The movie was filmed in Ontario, Canada (specifically in Toronto, Ottawa, and Thunder Bay) with the opening dance sequence filmed at a Honolulu, Hawaii location of Tower Records. Here's the location doubling (and things that didn't get hidden): *** The served as the exterior of the Hacker's warehouse hideout (the interior was a studio set). *** The scenes in the Victorian era-theme park were filmed in the , with large green screens put up to mask out the surrounding skyscrapers around the district and visible in the distance from it. *** The department store fight was filmed at . They didn't even try to hide the well-known signs or the iconic neon on the building's exterior, or the store name. *** The scene where the characters meet up with to discuss how to solve the mystery was filmed at the . You can see Grave Digger jumping the fence separating the airport from a nearby boat launching area. *** The haunted house in the climatic scenes was for the exterior whilst the interior was a studio set. *** The Annette Street Library served as the stunt double of the Barnaby B. Busterfield III Library's exterior, whilst the interior was a studio set. *** The Zoom kids' TV studio is , the former studio complex of Rogers Media. During filming, the building was covered almost entirely with green-painted Tyvek to digitally paint the building with graffiti with Zoom logos and various colors and shapes. *** The park where Barney lives is the . The caboose from the actual Barney & Friends show was added in digitally (a mobile home was painted green and dragged into the spot where the caboose is in the film). *** Regarding the "residences" of the Zoomers: Mike's house is , Kortney's house is the at , Francesco's house is , Cara's house is , Kyle's apartment used the (which ironically later became apartments) for it's exterior and a studio set for it's interior, Maya's house is , and Shing Ying's neighborhood is the . *** Sesame Street was mostly recreated using and . They didn't even try to hide some of the LGBT-themed decorations in the former. *** The hockey arena Dongwa and Shing Ying play hockey in is the (then named Ricoh Coliseum) for the interior and for the exterior. *** The concert scenes were filmed at the . *** The scenes where Dongwa and Nai-Nai sing about their love for each other and where Shing Ying discusses with The Brain on how to find the missing books were filmed in . *** The bad movie award ceremony was filmed at at the . *** The ending dance scene was filmed in . * I Was Young and Needed the Money: ** stated that he played Richard Quickster for this reason, and as an excuse to visit Toronto with some friends. Slightly Averted in that he actually thinks the film is decent nowadays compared to how critics breathed fire at it 14 years ago (at the time of this writing). * Money, Dear Boy: ** 's reason for playing Richard Quickster, which was also an excuse for him to go on vacation in Toronto with his friends. He stated "I heard there was an audition being held for "Crazy British School Dropout Villain" in some PBS Kids movie at Planet Ice in Milton Keynes, so I auditioned for the role as mockingly over-the-top as possible, and a couple of weeks later at The Fringe some execs from PBS came up to me and went "You won the audition, here's $2 million, now fly into Toronto as soon as possible and do this kids flick starring the Sesame Street Muppets and other characters from educational kids' show." And I didn't have time to say No at all!" * Pop-Star Composer: Rinava scored the film and composed all the themes and original songs from the film, save for the songs used in the actual Share A Story campaign's promos which were used in this film. Their contributions are noted by Sagwa's collar having a visible stitching reading "J.R." (the initials for the band's resident furry Jaylin Rounds) on the back. * Retroactive Recognition: ** as one of the kids Sagwa recruits to help solve the mystery. ** as Richard Quickster, the villain, of all characters. * Special Effect Failure: ** When Barney and Big Bird are discussing how to solve the mystery, in one shot from the back of Barney we can see that Barney's mouth isn't moving. ** Any shot where the non-full bodied puppet characters are full-bodied for say, bicycling scenes. ** The use of the Roger Rabbit Effect is a little spotty at times. * Troubled Production: And how! ** CPB chairman Kenneth Tomlinson wanted to co-write the movie. Since a lot of the production team disagreed due to his conservative ideologies that he was spraying PBS with at the time, he was credited as Alan Smithee, and that was for the best for most of the production crew. ** The film was originally supposed to be shot in Raleigh, North Carolina, however due to logistics, and time, issues, filming was moved to Ontario, Canada. ** Rinava were brought on as composers and original song producers after The B-52's turned the initial offer down. When the El Kadsreian Beatmakers themselves arrived in Toronto to start recording, they spent their first few minutes fawning over the Sagwa cast as the show was very popular among El Kadsreians, this was to the point where Jaylin Rounds telling Jesse Vinet (the voice of Sheegwa) that her voice "sounded like Heaven" puzzled Vinet. ** During pre-production, Tomlinson wanted to hold an audition for an actor to play Richard Quickster. Cherry Cheva jokingly suggested going to the United Kingdom and auditioning "actors from the BBC dramas the member stations air every night" for the role. Tomlinson took her seriously and held an audition for the role at a Planet Ice in Milton Keynes, and the audition ending up having a winner - then-Edinburgh Fringe regular John Oliver. He took the role in the end, and when he arrived in Toronto to begin filming, he was shown some of the PBS Kids shows for reference... only to look confused to hear Clifford the Big Red Dog and some other characters speak with American accents (in the U.K., the show (along with some of it's fellow PBS Kids series including Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, who's main kitten trio had a huge role in the film) was redubbed with British-accented actors). ** Eric Jacobson refused to portray Bert and Grover in the film as he believed the script was the worst one he'd ever read and that he'd "rather be the first hostage to die in a bank robbery". So Frank Oz (Bert, Grover, and Cookie Monster's original performer) and John Kennedy (who performed Kermit on the Disney Cruise Line Muppet shows) picked up the slack for Bert and Grover respectively. ** Frank Oz and Steve Whitmire essentially acted as a real-life version of a buddy cop show on and off set, frequently bumbling in order to get through filming quickly. ** Chuck Norris appeared for free to appease his relatives who loved PBS' kids shows, thus creating a nightmare for his agent who didn't receive money for his appearance. ** Robert Alvarez was ordered by Tomlinson to fire the transportation captain after he was caught by him reading a copy of Adbusters, and Ty Olsson, the voice of Ord from Dragon Tales, became the acting transportation captain as a result, leading to on-set nicknames such as "Ord-tto Mann". One crew member joked that Kenneth "probably thinks anti-apartheid activists wanted to boycott South Africa out of existence for being whites-only, when in reality they tried to make a change but went a little too far at times." ** Oliver Grainger's voice had cracked to a lower, teenage pitch midway through the recording of Dongwa's dialogue, and all of his dialogue had to be re-recorded to match. ** Holly Gauthier-Frankel, taking double duty as Sagwa and Fern, was in a deep depression at the time and had an eating disorder. This made matters worse for Montreal voice director Mark Camacho, who yelled at her during one recording session "This is a nightmare because of the problems with you and all of us, and all I want to do is to get this damn thing out in the theaters soon!" ** Oliver and Holly's issues and other problems (including Jesse Vinet's puberty causing Sheegwa's voice to sound a bit off and a fire alarm activation interrupting recording) caused Mark to simply leave the recording studio on the last day of dialogue/music recording without saying goodbye to anyone. ** To accommodate the puppeteers and the Muppet performers, some of the studio sets were riddled with trapdoors. This caused problems when people tripped over them. ** Some of the location filming proved difficult when kids began running onto the set after the Muppet performers and other in-suit actors. In the end, the Toronto police was called in to provide security. ** Richard Benjamin initially was asked to reprise his role of Ben Feld from Marci X as a G-rated pimp who helps our heroes, however he flew in with Billy Griffith, the actor for Tubby Fenders from the same movie, so Tubby was written in on the spot. ** Chuck Norris and R. Lee Ermey stole a golf cart from Ty during filming after he became transportation captain and goofed around for an hour outside a location shoot in Thunder Bay, Ontario. This caused numerous facepalms from on-set PBS execs and giggles from cast and crew members. Also, Dennis Anderson and Pablo Huffaker took their Grave Digger trucks to a nude beach on days wherein the nudists weren't there, and essentially goofed around with their expensive monster trucks on both Clear Channel Entertainment and the producers' dime. ** Oliver Grainger and Sonja Ball had issues with the dialogue between Dongwa and Nai-Nai, claiming that it sounded way too romantic for a grandson and grandmother to be saying. One rewrite later and the dialogue wasn't as creepy as it was before. The whole ordeal saw the storyboard artists jokingly drawing art of the two cats having sex, of which some of were later leaked onto the internet and uploaded onto sites such as Rule 34, leading to the phrase "Yes d-d-d-Dongwa, you put the-the "Dong" in your own n-n-name!" uttered by Nai-Nai in one of these artworks to become a minor internet meme. ** Craft services flew in a Papa Gino's catering service from Boston on the producers' dime in order to meet the demands of the then-Zoomers, who believed the chain's pizza was better than that of Chuck E. Cheese's, who was paying for product placement. ** Some of the extras could not speak English (only French for some with the rest could only speak Chinese, Vietnamese, or even Arabic), and relied on interpreters to communicate with the production crew. ** During the filming of Dennis Anderson's scene with some of the gang, Grave Digger 14 broke off the entire front axle whilst landing following the jump over the fence at the Ottawa airport where the scenes were filmed. Thankfully, Pablo Huffaker had brought Grave Digger 16 as a backup for Dennis and the takes of the scene used in the film had 16 doubling for 14, with Dennis and Pablo rotating driving duties. ** Out of all of the scenes, the beginning dance scene at a Tower Records was done not only as principal photography as wrapping up, but also saw the shoot team having to travel to Honolulu, Hawaii in the States to shoot it as the Tower Records in Toronto had long since closed. ** Robert Englund was literally given the role of the M.C. of the bad movie award ceremony on the spot, he was visiting a friend who worked on the set and was asked by Alvarez to play the role. This also caused problem as his agent wasn't notified, causing royalty issues with said agent. ** In the end, the film bombed at the box office and received mixed reviews from critics... yet, somehow, both the Razzies and the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards turned a blind eye to the film's catastrophic failure, probably not because of the Take That to the former in the film. PBS killed off the PBS Kids Movies banner afterwards, and thus never made a non-documentary film again. * Vacation, Dear Boy: ** Everyone involved admitted they just wanted to visit Canada during filming. and Pablo Huffaker spent the off-days during filming driving their Grave Digger trucks over the beaches in (mainly in the naturists' areas when they weren't around). Category:Tropes